Teach for America: Who does it benefit?

Arriving at Connecticut College, I had a feeling I wanted to be a teacher, but I was not quite sure how I would get there.  After volunteering at a few schools, I began to realize that teaching might not be as easy as I thought it would be. Preparing to engage in a meaningful way with a class of students who each have their own needs is not an easy task and definitely not a task that can be completed during a five-week summer training session.

Over the past four years, I have worked to complete the elementary education certificate program at Connecticut College so that I will be prepared to teach next year.  Many other recent college graduates will also enter the profession next fall, some with certification and some without.  Many of those without will be placed through Teach For America (TFA), an organization that has some troubling implications for the education system.

As a freshman, one of the other options I considered was applying to TFA and getting a certification that way.  Previously, I had only heard of it as a prestigious program that some people from my high school had ended up doing after college.  I never had a TFA corps member at any of my schools in a majority white, upper middle class, suburb about 20 minutes west of Boston, nor do I think there will ever be one there.

The people I know who were TFA corps members are nice people, people who care about others and want to make a difference.  I am not writing to critique the individuals who join TFA, but instead to take a look at the effects it has as an organization in contrast to what many of the individuals involved are lead to believe they are doing.

The TFA website states their mission: “growing the movement of leaders who work to ensure that kids growing up in poverty get an excellent education.”  TFA plans to do this by recruiting students from top colleges and universities, with or without a background in education, training them for five weeks over the summer and placing them as classroom teachers that fall.  All corps members make a two-year commitment, but there have been many cases where they fall through.  The goal is not necessarily to create lifelong teachers, but to create “lifelong leaders for a better world.”

The idea is that future leaders, some of whom will be teachers, will have exposure to the education system in a meaningful way, thus motivating them to keep it in mind for the rest of their lives.  The problem with this concept is that students are not the first priority. There’s no doubt TFA is an organization with prestige—it makes a great resume item.  Joining TFA as an entirely self-interested decision is, well, selfish, but not as bad as joining with the intent of saving the public education system.

The organization’s original idea was to place corps members in “high need” areas where there were not enough teachers.  That is no longer the case.  This summer, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) laid off 2,100 employees (over 1,000 unionized teachers) and increased their contract with TFA to $1.6 million from the $1.3 million they had spent in recruiter fees the previous school year. TFA teachers are paid by CPS, as any first year teacher would be. Chicago does not have a teacher shortage; nor do most places where TFA is placing teachers.

The financial benefit of having TFA teachers is that they are first or second year teachers so their salary is not as high.  The other financial benefit is that the teachers will likely not stay around for more than two years, so they will not have to pay into their pension through a full career.

While the financial benefits of having teachers who only stay for two years may seem enticing, it is really not a system that will help “close the achievement gap,” which refers to the difference in test scores between groups of different socioeconomic status, race and gender.  It should come as no surprise that white males of higher socioeconomic status perform better on standardized tests.  There is now a trend to call the achievement gap “the opportunity gap” to more accurately reflect the lack of opportunity that causes the difference in achievement.  Having teachers come and go every two years is not actually a good way to try to fix this gap in opportunity.

Supposedly, the TFA corps members are the best of the best, so their presence alone will make a difference.  Students deserve better than this.   They deserve teachers who are making an investment in them in the long run, teachers who are teaching because they love teaching, teachers who are working to develop their future as a teacher.  Teaching is more than a job, it’s a profession, and it’s time we started to treat it as such.

TFA recruiters call upon Connecticut College every year.   As liberal arts students, it’s our job to look at organizations critically and evaluate their true purposes.  Although it may seem like a good career decision, students should not be used as “stepping stones” to further career paths.

If teaching is really what you want to do and it’s too late to join the Education Department here at Conn, look into fellowships.  In a smaller structure, it’s more likely that your work will actually reflect the community needs and lead to a more fulfilling experience for both you and the students.